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Whether you’ve been working to make your small business’ products available via an online store for some time or you’re re-launching an existing online business, the “grand opening” of your online store may not be the same as a grand opening of a local location, but it has the potential to attract even more customers. These customers can become repeat visitors and fans of your company who will spread the word about your products, so it’s important your online store gives the right first impression.

Target the Right Visitors

Business 2 Community reports that 50 percent of small businesses spend less than $300 a month on online marketing. For your online business launch, you’re launching a company out of obscurity, so you need to be willing to spend more. However, who you target is more important than simply throwing a lot of money at your marketing efforts. Do your research and come up with a profile for the average customer of your shop, including age, gender, interests and location. Then target your marketing efforts to sites that cater to these same demographics.

Conversions

Once you get the traffic to your website, you need to get the majority to become paying customers. Come up with special promotions to celebrate your online store’s launch, promotions that will not only work to convert site visitors into shoppers but even help bring them to the site in the first place if you draw attention to them in your marketing efforts. For example, according to Hosting Facts, eight out of 10 consumers will shop online because of a free shipping offer. Free shipping, coupon codes and limited edition products are all popular methods of converting visitors into customers.

Social Media Sharing

Even the largest online marketing budget can only stretch so far. Create an organic social media sharing campaign so that your customers repost links to your online store and do much of the marketing legwork for you. The best way to do that is to craft social media posts likely to be popular by:

Sharing information about a special limited deal or product for the event

Including photos of your products or people using your products

Making use of hashtags; don’t overload a single post with hashtags, but do incorporate one or two relevant terms into your posts

Engaging the public with the post; for example, by holding a giveaway that people enter simply by following your social media accounts and reposting a link

When it comes to a successful online business launch, there are three things to keep in mind: attracting the most visitors possible from your targeted demographic, converting those visitors into customers and encouraging those customers to spread the word about your business. While it’s never too late to hold a special sales event and do all of these things, your online business’ first few weeks and months will prove most crucial to your company’s success, so it’s important to consider these things right from the launch.

Organizing guest posts for your blog offers only advantages. Ad Pushup reports that 62.96 percent of people find blogs with multiple authors to be more credible. Plus, relying on other authors to come up with original content for your blogs allows you to take some time off from creating new content, while keeping your blog updated on a regular basis. However, scheduling experts in the industry to contribute to your blog is only part of the equation. You should also have staff members from your company – or yourself if you’re a blogger on her own – do guest posts on other websites to increase traffic back to your own site.

Offer Your Expertise

You can’t wait for requests for guest blogs to come to you, although the more popular your site, the more likely you are to start getting these requests. Do research to discover the websites relevant to your industry or to your target demographic that get the most traffic. For example, if you sell baby clothes, research mommy blogs and other parenting online publications. If you sell a food product, reach out to recipe and cooking sites.

Contact the owner or operator and lay out your qualifications to write a guest post. Treat it as if you were applying for a job, by including a resume of relevant experience. Don’t expect every website to get back to you; contact at least ten different sites per week on the expectation that half or more of them won’t accept your offer. Once you’ve been accepted, be sure to include a bio with your post that links back to your own website.

Repeat Content

Depending on your agreement with the host of the website, you may be able to recycle content from your own website when guest blogging for someone else. This will save you time because you won’t have to research and write a new piece – all you have to do is arrange the guest post and pass along existing material. When contacting the owner of a website relevant to your blog, link her to the existing posts you think might do the best on her site. She can then post it with a caveat stating it originally appeared on your website, which is another opportunity for a link back to your own blog.

Schedule Them in Advance

As tempting as it may be to jump at the first few offers you receive to write guest posts, you’ll soon become overwhelmed if more sites than expected respond positively. Offer to schedule the posts several weeks in advance of the expected publication date so you have adequate time to research and write them. (The exception being reposted material, which can be posted as soon as the website owner is able.) Remember, this will be the first time many people see your work, so it’d undermine your efforts to turn in subpar guest posts because you’ve overbooked yourself.

It makes sense to devote the majority of your online marketing efforts to web content if you want to increase your site’s ranking in search engine results. According to WriteMySite, content creation is the single most effective SEO technique in the eyes of 53 percent of businesses. However, don’t keep your content exclusively to your website, as becoming a guest blogger is an effective way to increase the leads to your site.